2015 NYC Emerging Writers Fellows Reading

We shone the spotlight on our nine 2015 Center for Fiction fellows, who shared their work for the first time since being selected for the program in May. Chosen from over five hundred applicants, our most competitive year yet, each writer receives a grant, space to work in our Writers' Studio, as well as an opportunity to work one-on-one with a carefully selected editor andto meet agents and magazine editors at our monthly fellows' dinners​.

The Center for Fiction Fellowships for NYC Early Career Writers are made possible through a grant from The Jerome Foundation with matching funds from individual donors. For more information on the program click here.

Naomi Feigelson Chase is the author of six books of poetry, and many short stories which have been published and anthologized. She has reported for The Village Voice and has been a Fellow at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Banff Center for the Arts, and Virginia Center for the Arts, among others. She has taught fiction at the Harvard Extension and published non-fiction about child abuse and the sixties.

Lisa Chen was born in Taipei and grew up in the Bay Area. She has published a book of poems, Mouth (Kaya Press, 2007) and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the University of Iowa. She works as a freelance writer and brand consultant for social justice organizations and has held residencies at Blue Mountain Center and, most recently, her home in Brooklyn. Recent work appeared in Gigantic and The Progressive. She is working on a novel populated by rogue monkeys, Japanese silents and MSG mines and a nonfiction work inspired by the artist Tehching Hsieh.

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye is a native of Oakland, California. She received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and studied English and Cultural Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She has taught creative writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and in UNCW’s Young Writer’s Workshop, and served as the fiction editor of Ecotone for two years. Her work has appeared in Agni and Treehouse Magazine. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a novel.

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow who received her MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. Her fiction has appeared in Black Ivy, The Brooklyn Review and Bronx Biannual. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, No, Dear,The African American Review, Vinyl, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at: shesaidword.com.

Anu Jindal is the author of short stories published in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland, The New Quarterly, Pioneer, and Matrix Magazine. His short story “Not a Bad Bunch” was selected by Amazon to be a Kindle Single and Audible audiobook in 2014. A graduate of the MFA Poets & Writers program at University of Massachusetts Amherst, he currently resides in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and at Yeshiva University, where he will serve as writer-in-residence for Fall 2015.

Stephen Langlois is a writer of the fantastic and absurd. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Glimmer Train, The Portland Review, Necessary Fiction, Phantom Drift, Storychord, Burrow Press Review, Big Lucks, and Gigantic Sequins, among other places. He grew up in Vermont and lives in Brooklyn. Visit him at www.stephenmlanglois.com.

Melissa Rivero was born in Peru and grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives. Her love of writing fiction has taken her to workshops at VONA/ Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She has a BS from NYU and a JD from Brooklyn Law School. She is the mother of two young boys, and is currently at work on her first novel.

Samantha Storey is a senior news editor at The Huffington Post. Before that she was a digital editor for The New York Times. Her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times and The Seattle Weekly. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Calyx and The Lascaux Review. She studied writing with Philip Schultz at the Writer's Studio and participated in Hannah Tinti's master class for One Story. Born in New York, she grew up in England and now lives in Brooklyn with her family. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Ruchika Tomar is a writer from the Inland Empire, California. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and studied English Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York.